Paul Depondt

Traces on the artist's canvas

And all want to ascend to their heaven

“Perdre/ Mais perdre vraiment/ Pour laisser place à la trouvaille.”

Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, Toujours.

The young George Grosz, who not yet had had the idea of becoming a painter, once saw a noble lady at the veranda of his home painting a still life of peaches and plums. The boy was amazed about how she depicted the delicate glaucous blue plums. “She was actually only copying”, Grosz wrote many years later in his daybooki, “but I was infatuated with it.” It was the first time he had ever seen anybody paint. She had a paint chest full of paint tubes with colourful captions, an oval palette, course and fine paint brushes, trowel like knives and small bottles with resin like paint material. From that moment on, it was his most ardent wish to once own such a paint chest with everything in it. He took delight in looking at all of that and seeing how it was used. Since then, according to himself, Grosz had “the spicy scents of lavender and turpentine in my nostrils”.

Stéphanie Leblon (Ieper 1970)ii was raised amongst such paint and turpentine scents, ‘near’ the artist Godfried Vervisch.iii His studio was her biotope for several years. However, she did not immediately choose the art of painting. At the academies, painting was ‘out’. The delight of the paint chest, which Grosz still spoke of in his memories, now tasted ‘stale’. The craft of painting became less and less popular, because “the art of painting had to leave behind exactly that handicraft in order to be taken seriously in the temporary art world”. The idea behind the work was important, not the way how it was achieved.iv Still Leblon slowly but surely chose painting, a practice where you constantly take decisions and make artistic choices. How can you express impressions and images in paint? How large will the painting be? How do you prepare the canvas? How solid or thin is the paint? How explicit is the background going to be? How defined or blurred is the image going to be? How strong the composition? How do you frame a figure? How does the image move? How do you avoid frills and ornamentation?

Painting is a discipline. Leblon is also a disciplined worker: she explores carefully, with commitment and detachment, her visual material and her form language. But in the discipline of painting the 'gesture' or 'elasticity' are also important, the handling of the materials, the ‘acts’ of the painter's profession. The art of painting is not just about ideas or findings, but also about the physical ‘act’ of painting, about the sensory experience when making a painting, the scratching of the knife, the fraying of the canvas, the rustling of the brushes, the sopping and the brushing, and the smell of turpentine and oil paint Grosz was talking about. Her visual material is versatile; she collects all kinds of striking ‘images’ from magazines and papers or from the internet. Those actually accidentally found ‘images’ could instigate a painting. Yet her form language, how she ‘composes’ her paintings, is reasoned. Leblon is not a ‘wild painter’, who messily uses paints and brushes on canvas with big gestures, le grand geste; on the contrary, she works as Roger Raveel from a tempered emotionalism, and from a tight and neutral approach of her subjects.

Leblon has huge admiration for the ‘young’ Raveel, for the way he wanted to penetrate reality deeper, for his constant wakefulness and presentation of the question about ‘the perception’. Raveel is a creator of images.v What he saw in his village - concrete piles, fences, red roofs behind boscages - were pieces in his paintings, the visual material. But he also had his own form language: simultaneously abstract squares were toppling on the painting, he drew lines and strings, he put dots and course coloured areas on the painting. Such interwoven figurative elements and abstract forms are also found in Leblon’s work. That is how a painting, with a light training of the artist's drive, gets more form and calibre, a sharper shape and outline, and most of all more tension.

“The illusion is what fascinates me in a painting”, says Leblon, “the flirting with what is not there, the playing with suggestion of space and movement.” A good painting is never unambiguous. Une image peut en cacher une autre.vi While you are looking at one thing, something else stays hidden. Every work of art has a sort of dormant side, only visible when closely looked at. There are always double or multiple meanings, nothing is unambiguous. Paintings have stratification. There is sediment. Per Kirkeby’s landscape paintings seem to be abstract on the surface. But when you take a closer look, you will descry the contours of some motive, maybe a horse or a snake, sometimes even a reference to a different painting, and finally all kinds of scenes surface. That is “the magic of the art of painting”: multiple stratification admitting many interpretations and allowing a lot of freedom. René Daniëls, one of Leblon’s favourite artists, has always surrounded his work with a deliberate air of mystery and magic. He explores every farthest corner in his paintings; they are about the generation process of a scene, about the fight with the subject and with the canvas, with the urge to create and the artist's gear. But his paintings also look light-footed and funny, intelligent and put in perspective. They are enchanting by their playful magic.

Leblon works in ‘series’, the paintings are related and then exposed in clusters. She resolutely imposes herself such restrictions, by setting herself directional themes as an aid while painting. That too is discipline. In her ‘images’ she investigates what intrigues her: how people still want to make nonsusceptible and paranormal phenomenons tangible with complex measuring equipment and substantial theories (‘The measured state’ in Gallery Jan Dhaese, Gent, Belgium, 2009); how everybody's life is directed by visible or covert rites de passage (‘Roots’ in Cultural Centre, Ieper, Belgium, 2010); how we can still see and perceive in our sleep (‘Kings of sleep’ in Gallery Jan Dhaese, Gent, Belgium, 2011); how withdrawn people can extract themselves from their protective shell and broaden their outlook (the series about ‘Gothic’ and ‘emotion’ in the Neues Kunstforum, Cologne, Germany, 2012). The themes, often springing from accumulated visual material, sharpen her own observations. The practice of painting is about observing, about deepening and problematising the observation, about exploring the options – painting is more than just a means to interpret a concept or an emotion, it is “visual thinking”, the art of thinking in and with ‘images’.

The work is about searching, “groping in the dark”.vii The characters in her paintings are the searchers. For one of her series, she was looking for 'images' that were related to the paranormal. She collected photographs, the traces of her work, and explored the world of suggestions and spiritual séances. It is a way of entering an imaginary world – the world of the painting. “Via a television programme about a bewitched house with its residents, a medium, a sceptic and a researcher with measuring equipment”, she said in an interview as a result of the Prize for Visual Arts of the Province of West Flanders she was awarded in 2010. “Week after week they met. I found the researcher the most fascinating figure, because he wanted to seize something that is not provable by definition. So I painted figures with their eyes shut and with diagrams or instruments that want to prove all kinds of thing, but that cannot be seized. It is as if you want to show the sublime moment in a painting, the moment when it is right. It is there or not. For the art of painting is one big mystery.” During the sketching and drawing, aided by the collected visual material, she virtually plunges in the unfathomable zones of the unconsciousness. The characters close their eyes or carry a mask. They are being ‘measured’, sensed by hands, deliberated. The paintings’ titles refer to the mysterious and strange world of Hypnos, the ‘God of sleep’: In-between (2008), Memoires of a dreamer (2009), The disturbing thought (2009). In a different series, ‘Kings of sleep’, Leblon paints sleeping figures and again the titles refer to the private world of the dream: Bubble of sleep (2010), Yellow dream (2010), Sleepline (2011). Sleepers or hypnotised people are vulnerable and fragile. Different from an official portrait or a character sketch, the painting of a sleeper shows a state of helplessness and innocence, but also of subjection and dependence. Sleepers have no power. They are caught by sleep and literally restrained. On some paintings the sleeper's only prop is a tack: Hypnos’ reins.

It is about the ‘right image’. All that is handed by the collected visual material, is gradually blurred during the drawing and the painting. The images are aids, the props are accessories. Paintings can be the result of a sort of sampling, where collected images are unravelled and analysed. The painting The treatable reality (2009), from the ‘Roots’ series, shows a blindfolded man caught up in ropes with a noose around his neck. It is about a lodge brother and the scene of his serious predicament is a rite de passage, a ritual through which the man wants to join the fraternity. The origin of the visual material, which is just like paint or brushes part of the painter's gear, is never explicit. This intensifies the magic and mystery of the painting. When looking at a painting such as Plastic Boy (2010) you really don’t have to know that the boy is pulling a plastic bag over his head to make a cast of his face. The ‘right image’ has its very own logic.

On Man with dog, a painting from the late nineties, a recumbent man is depicted. A dog is squeezing his snout in his mouth or is wringing himself loose. “Who is biting who and who is who?” is one of the lines poet Luuk Gruwezviii wrote about the painting. “The man the dog? The dog the man?” With each painting such questions are countless. Is what I see real? Or is it an illusion? “And are the dog and the man biting each other or are they kissing loose-lipped and licentiously, but dead tired?” What you see, someone else does not. You are the one who is looking. On the paintings from the series ‘Gothic’ and ‘emotion’, for which Leblon made bigger than life-size preparatory drawings in a studio of the Cité des Arts near the Parisian Notre-Dame, apparently a theatre curtain is being raised. Something is made visible on the stage of the painting. They are scenes with figures on some kind of festival ground who are protecting themselves against the rain with a plastic poncho or hood. The transparent protection is pulled over the head in a theatrical manner, with an awkward choreography and a similar clumsy play of hands, an ‘act’ that yields the same bizarre and illusory images as on the paintings Plastic Boy or In-between.

Leblon draws sketchy, with strings or paint sets in diluted paint, the contours of a setting in which her characters perform. The scene is mostly defined, ‘safe’ and ‘protected’ by the floral or organic play of lines, the draped coloured areas or the protective covers. The furthermore totally unknown and anonymous festival goers on the paintings are looking for shelter under their plastic covers, they are in the midst of thousands of others on the ground withdrawn into themselves, left to their own devices. Somehow or other those paintings remind of the place where they were created, in the studio near the Parisian Notre-Dame. You recognise the archetypical visual elements from the Gothic style: the man in the niche, the gargouilles or gargoyles, the morphological structure of the cathedral with its pinnacles, transepts, gables, flèches and high towers. And again, the collected 'visual material' is sampled and recycled. The idea of the festival goers looking for shelter grew from the Gothic image language (the niche as a protective case for the holy figures, the vierge ouvrante – the Virgin Mary cherishing the faithful under her wide open cloak). From perception, the closely watching, new images develop. As ever, her ‘visual material’ and her ‘form language’ go accompanied by a sturdy statement, an accentuated train of ideas for each series. “It is about the watching, the perspective”, according to Leblon.ix “We live in a time that is coloured by our own emotions; our point of view is completely different from back then. Perspective used to be different - the cathedral draws your eyes up – now it is more introspective.” Our emotions direct our view and restrict or narrow our perspective. “And all want to ascend to their heaven”, composes poet Gruwez for the painting Man with dog, “but all fall in their grave.”

On each painting you will find traces, memories or experiences, archetypical figures from her ‘visual repertoire’ – the folders with the collected photographs and pictures – but also autobiographical scars and injuries. Those traces are never explicit; they are blurred, removed and deleted. From such memories, that are meaningful to you alone, new images appear: a face, a silhouette, a ritual, a pair of hands, a mask, the posture of a festival goer on a soggy festival meadow, a gargoyle. They are traces that have fixed themselves. Maybe that is the essence of Leblon’s way of painting: the traces on the painter’s canvas, turbid and concealed, lost and spirited away, traces that lead to artistic ideas on the canvas and whilst painting. Guillaume Apollinairex writes, “Perdre, mais perdre vraiment/ Pour laisser place à la trouvaille.” Painting is a search, a rebus that Leblon unscrambles in her studio. It is invention, with many thinking exercises, but at the same time discipline, set out for the ‘finding’ of the painting.

i George Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No (Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein), The Dial Press, New York 1946 .